System administration is the method by which a customer can tailor or change a communication system (e.g., assign personal lines, calling features, monitor usage, replace circuit cards, etc.) to meet his or her needs. In some prior systems, system administration required that the system be powered-down before any system reconfiguration be performed. To accomplish this the system administrator would have to tell all of the system users when the system was going to be down and would terminate all active calls at that time. Disadvantageously, this approach resulted in significant interruptions in system operation.
In another type of system, when station administration is required, the system administrator makes the changes piecemeal, a station feature at a time. Each change being made when the equipment associated with that feature becomes idle and additional changes not being made until the previous change is completed. In such a system, line administration changes are also accomplished piecemeal, a facility at a time. Because of this piecemeal approach the changes may require significant amounts of time to complete and additionally may result in some system communications occurring with an incompletely configured system.